A review by nicktomjoe
Ness by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood

5.0

Certainly the hardest read of the year: to be taken slowly, re-read, lines of thought and passing references followed. Worth every second, every lost trail refound, as angels and demons of landscape and redemption emerge and enter combat: each of the avenging angels of nature (or are they all one?) has a menace from a green Book of Revelation; every destructive force in the Green Chapel has a doomed mauvaise foi... with sparse, ambiguous illustrations this is a book to ponder and to take time over.
A powerful meditation on the Ozymandias-like fall of ambition in the Anthropocene - or reclamation of place by longer-term forces beyond our generation; a clever, T S Eliot-like juggling of cultural references and voice to evoke place, despair and hope.